Liberia Local Empowerment for Government Inclusion and Transparency (LEGIT). The LEGIT project supports the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Governance Commission as they lead, monitor and coordinate the implementation of the government’s decentralization agenda. Your mapping will help facilitate the decentralization process in Liberia!

HOT and DAI have teamed up to map populated places in an 8 miles radius of each of Zwedru, Ganta and Gbarnga cities to support the government’s decentralization process.

This project is to trace buildings and map roads in Ganta City, Nimba County. The city covers an 8 miles radius from the center of the city. Please use the Imagery provided by USAID GeoCenter (it should load automatically in the iD and JOSM editors). This imagery may be offset, see instructions for details.

HOT uses OpenStreetMap for Humanitarian Response and Economic Development. Together with other partners, and through The Missing Maps project, these mapping tasks facilitate pre-emptive mapping of priority countries to better facilitate disaster response and medical activities as well as resource allocation and service delivery.

Project Specific Mapping Notes

Some of these squares may already be partially or fully mapped, please review and map missing features if needed, fix up the existing mapping, or just mark it "Done" if already completely well mapped.

Imagery Notes

Please use the imagery provided by USAID GeoCenter as it is often newer than Bing or Mapbox. If however imagery is offset, align it to existing features or GPS traces where applicable, if no GPS available, use Bing imagery as best alignment.

Buildings

Please accurately outline all the buildings you can find. The outline should be for the full size of the building even if it is partly covered by trees in the imagery.

Most buildings are rectangular, after drawing the outline, use the 's' key in the iD web editor to "square" the corners.

For circular buildings there is the 'o' key in the iD editor to create a circular structure.

Many buildings are very close, but do not actually touch each other, try to map them close to each other without letting them connect or share nodes with each other, roads or residential area outlines. In the iD web editor, holding down the "alt" key will keep nodes of "snapping" to each other and accidentally connecting.

In the iD web editor, the first time you map a building you will use the "Building Features" category and then at the top of the list select "Building" again, this is the most generic building tag we can use as we almost never can tell the more specific use of any building from imagery alone.

If you have personal/local knowledge of a building, please add that information to the building, like the name or type of building (hospital, school, gas station, etc).

Roads and Other Features

Please map roads as completely as possible by connecting them to the main road networks wherever possible.

Very short segments that do not connect to anything should not be mapped.

Short segments of a road or path that you cannot see through the trees but seem very likely to exist should be mapped to keep the road complete

Try and map a little beyond your task square so the person who maps the task square next to yours can easily connect them.

Always connect roads to other roads where they meet and never end roads on Residential area polygon edges.

You will most often use the following road classifications (JOSM):
highway=primary, highway=secondary, highway=tertiary - These are major roads that connect large cities and span long distances. Many of these are already mapped, just be sure to map the unclassifieds and residential that run off of the existing mapped roads.
highway=unclassified - This is for roads that a vehicle with 4 wheels could travel on that connect small villages and settlements.
* highway=residential - These are roads that are in settlements that only are used for access to houses and buildings.

You will most often use the following "Road Features" (iD Web Editor):
Minor/Unclassified - This is for roads that connect small villages and settlements
Residential Road - These are roads that are in settlements but only are used for access to houses and buildings.